I think this is more in line with the spirit of the thread, trying to find the weird contradictions, the oddities… I really enjoyed the ‘trivia’ involving Hitler being the first modern world leader addressing animal rights.
Obviously this comes NOWHERE near the level of the Hitlers of the world, but the Lance Armstrong paradox has always been an interesting thing to me. Not necessarily saying we need to go into his… Stuff. But that was where my head went earlier in this thread. The grey areas.
You claim he was never a believer but there is no evidence that he was never a believer. He also never abandoned Christianity and his later beliefs had elements of it combined with communism.
The problem is, every ideology is connected to evil outcomes. You just pick the ones you don’t like to use as examples. You think capitalism has never been behind some evil event? Christianity? Or is it in those cases it wasn’t real capitalism or Christianity?
Reagan and flooding inner cities with crack. The Iraq War. Churchill and India. Nixon and Pinochet. Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.
That’s actually what led me to learn more about Jim Jones. I grew up regarding him as a fringe religious nut who convinced other religious nuts to “drink the kool-aid”. The minute I realized, “whoa, he was a hard-core communist?” was the minute I started diving into the subject.
Keeping with the spirit of this thread, Jim Jones and The People’s Temple presents a very interesting story and I encourage anyone who agrees or disagrees with me to learn more about it on their own. It really is an incredible tale of American sociocultural output that ended with an objectively evil outcome.
Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. This dude was creepy AF!
Ed Kemper I find interesting. Most people who know him say he is friendly, would not give any type of vibe he was a killer. But the dude was a giant and a genius (tested at like 140-145 IQ as a teenager in Juvenile detention). His intelligence and ability to manipulate people led to his release (they were even letting him evaluate others before his release).
I won’t get into an the motives and other details. Just thought reading about him was worth while and crazy.
Yep! There’s the issue of production planing without market forced, but from a societal level, people are just self serving. That’s not a bad thing. But it does make systems like communism that essentially depend on good will unviable in relatively large populations IMO
I was just at a seminar yesterday. The paper being my presented was on the decay of social norms and basically showed that the only way for pro social norms tk be sustained in a public goods game is for there to be an enforcement mechanism
Sure, the experiment has its flaws, but if cooperative norms can’t be sustained in a situation where gains from cheating are minimal (extra 1-2 euros of compensation), I don’t see how they could be sustained when the potential reward is much much much bigger.
Jew here, as you know.
Where did you get this about Stalin, and what years are you referring to for his anti-Semitism?
I’ve read and heard about Soviet anti-Semitism and it appears to me totally incongruent with reality. Stalin surrounded himself with Jews, had a bureaucracy heavily staffed with Jews, outlawed anti-Semitism, and had a secret police (NKVD) of commissars that were nearly all Jewish. Communist Jews played a leading role in the Bolshevik Revolution.
mostly in his later years tbh, but apparently he’s always had a resentment towards Jews
Here’s a nice article detailing some of his policies
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24660789
Thanks. I’ll take a look. @anna_5588
I’ve always been taught that Stalin was anti-semetic and there are reports of him expressing highly anti-semetic views, but the actually horrendous policies could be a function of paranoia rather than extreme antisemitism. the USSR government might not have been that much more antisemetic that, for example, the US government was in the past
For example, the doctors plot is often interpreted as a targeted action against Jews, but it could be that Stalin was really targeting doctors and it happens that a large proportion of doctors are Jewish.
But in my view, it doesn’t really matter why he killed innocent ppl, he still killed them. I still respect him and Lenin more than hitler bc they were, at least during the war years, willing to put the needs of the nation above ideology (NEP, bringing generals from the Gulag, making concessions with the church)